


"You're leaving?"; "For Kerberos."

by Allegory



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Angst, Fluff, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pre-Canon, SHEITH - Freeform, SHEITH FFS, a bunch of head canons about how they met, as usual, keith is a salty kitten, shiro saves keith, suicidal keith up to interpretation (?)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 09:21:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10434588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allegory/pseuds/Allegory
Summary: “Foot,” Keith mumbles. The shadows begin to gain definition; rows of cacti standing like bookshelves, the man holding him in a flight suit, dark hair, shaven at the back.The man glances down and his eyes widen, enough that Keith makes out the dark brown of his irises and his chapped lips, peeling from thirst. There’s something in his face that reminds Keith of himself sometimes, drunk on six-can brandy packs, rinsing the vomit off his chin in the bathroom. The man’s pace slows—Keith is thankful. The slight jolts had been agitating a bruise on his back.“Foot?” the man parrots. He pauses just so that his head blocks the scorching sun from Keith’s eyes. It creates a halo around his face, a luminescence..Oneshot.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [myself DUH](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=myself+DUH).



Keith Kogane concludes as alarms blare around him, systems turning red, that maybe this isn’t the brightest idea he’s ever hatched. Debris crashes against his fighter plane, cracking several inches of thick silica nanofiber, damaging the wings beyond repair. He’d heard stories about it all the time; how when you’re running on your last seconds of life, you cling to your memories, sifting through love and pain and everything in between.

Bullshit. The only thing Keith’s thinking of is how vicious the base of the pit looks, ripped with jagged rocks five times the size of his fighter, sharp enough to impale him like a piece of steak. He clenches his guts.

The pain doesn’t come as he expects. Instead a blunt force slams against his head and spots appear in his vision. Or are those the gaps between the rocks? Keith isn’t sure. The last thing he registers is the shadow of a giant bird beneath him, swooping up, up…

 

Keith stirs to a burning pain in his right temple. He groans, trying to make sense of his surroundings. There’s only a white light at first, then a shape, an unmistakeably human form bobbing before him. Hands on his back; Keith registers the sound of medi-jets, their old-fashioned wings beating in the desert heat.

“Foot,” Keith mumbles. The shadows begin to gain definition; rows of cacti standing like bookshelves, the man holding him in a flight suit, dark hair, shaven at the back.

The man glances down and his eyes widen, enough that Keith makes out the dark brown of his irises and his chapped lips peeling from thirst. There’s something in his face that reminds Keith of himself sometimes, drunk on six-can brandy packs, rinsing the vomit off his chin in the bathroom. The man’s pace slows—Keith is thankful. The slight jolts of his jog had been agitating a bruise on Keith's back.

“Foot?” the man parrots. He pauses just so that his head blocks the scorching sun from Keith’s eyes. It creates a halo around his face, a luminescence.

Keith says nothing more. He scrabbles for purchase on something—he doesn’t know it’s the man’s arm until much later—as he kicks his foot, trying to adjust the blood flow to his ankle. The nettles stinging at his toes eventually subside. By then he realizes he’s in the shade of the jet. His head is resting on the lap of the sad-looking man, the brown fizzing out of his eyes as the doors to the jet slide close. It haunts Keith in the brief moment before everything fades to black.

 

Keith is told that his name is Lieutenant Shirogane Takashi.

Lieutenant Shirogane had been on a scouting mission when he saw an ally fighter plane taking a nosedive that was definitely not intentional. Keith hears the full story only when he’s made a full recovery, ironing his uniform out in the cadets’ common room: in the space of a few minutes, the lieutenant slammed his boosters until his plane was right beneath Keith’s, the up-thrust of his emergency engine reducing the terminal crash speed of Keith’s vessel. The pressure would have been impossible to handle but Shirogane did it nonetheless, propelling them up to an outcropping where he had to nurse him for several days until the medi-jets received their coordinates.

It hits Keith while he’s lying in bed, taking comfort in cleaning his knives and blades, that he’s never had a chance to thank the lieutenant. In fact he hasn’t seen him since that one day in the infirmary—and even then, Keith had been straggling between fitful periods of sleep. All he’d known from the encounter was the lieutenant's straight-backed posture, the hard contours of his face. Like that other man, the deep-seated desolation in his cigarette ashes and the lost love in his lungs. Gone.

 _Gone?_ Keith wonders, glancing at the landscape of monotonous sand dunes outside his window. Perhaps it had been the desert creating strange creatures in his mind. Keith doesn’t think he’ll ever find out.

 

Until his second year. Lieutenant Shirogane is no longer lieutenant; the cadets salute him as he strides through the hallways. He nods curtly in return, but something has changed about him. Something other than the twin medals he had been awarded in the past year alone in two consecutive months. Maybe it’s just that Keith has been put in a holding cell and the silhouette of the man behind the one-way window is unmistakeable, and it curdles his stomach to think that the man who had saved his life would be the same one to expel him from flight school.

When Captain Shirogane enters, Keith lowers his head and stares at the edge of the white table. He tries to maintain as much of his dignity as possible—he hasn’t fallen over thus far, which counts for something. Shirogane takes the seat opposite to him. In his peripheral vision, the captain cards through a tuff of his hair.

“You want to tell me how you got into this?”

“Not really,” Keith doesn’t know where this is bravery, or stupidity, is coming from.

Shirogane crosses his arms over the table. He tilts his head until Keith can see his furrowed brows, a question knitted between them. His lips aren’t chapped anymore, Keith notices.

“Your eyes are red. Not from crying.”

Keith groans. “All right, I went into town and smoked weed. I smuggled some into the dorm for my friends, which is against the cadet rulebook, and it should mean a suspension but this is my third offense which means I'm expelled. Happy?”

“Your other offenses?”

“I beat someone up in my first year.” Keith pauses. Silence gnaws his brain. The tinge of disapproval in the captain’s face snares him, a double punch to his ego. “The other wasn’t really an offense,” Keith finishes, his voice cracking a little. He clears his throat as if to swat the words away.

“What happened to you?”

“I’m done here,” Keith sighs. His head has begun throbbing, from the interrogation or the weed, he isn’t sure. “I fucked myself up, I get it. I don’t need to be telling you shit, _captain_.”

Shiro gives no response and it’s like the interrogation is doing itself.

“…m’ sorry, Sir.”

Shiro stands. “Walk with me.”

Keith expects to be whittled to the core as they stroll around the perimeter of the building. But Shiro only makes small talk about the desert, the history of the cadet academy and his own adventures beyond the dunes. Keith finds that his thoughts have drifted away from the day’s shitty events. Shiro only pushes the topic when their walk comes to an end. Keith wishes it never had.

“I know about you,” he begins, back against Keith. He stows one hand in his pocket. “I read your files while you were recuperating, to try and figure out what you were doing all the way out there. Everyone speculated that you were just being your reckless self—but you love planes, don’t you? No true-born pilot would crash a plane like that.”

“No,” Keith hums. “I suppose not.”

Shiro turns around to face him. He places a hand on Keith’s shoulder; Keith doesn’t shrug him off. Doesn’t want to, for some reason. “You have so much potential, Keith. I’m sorry that I read your files without your permission, but I know you haven’t come from the best of homes. That doesn’t have to define you. You can make something for yourself, and I promise that I’ll help you in any way I can.”

“I’m not going to be expelled?”

Shiro offers him a slight smile. “Let this be a new start.”

As Keith walks to the dorms that night, he hates that there are tears stinging the back of his eyes.

 

Keith turns into a first class fighter pilot. He aces all his theory exams and his professors are shocked by the change- as if someone had swapped him out overnight. The council sends him a letter requesting him to give a speech at the end of the year to motivate the younger students. The thought of having to speak in front of everyone scares him to death. So of course he turns it down. In any case, he hasn't graduated yet, so celebration isn't the first thing on his mind.

On Christmas night, Keith is alone in his dorm room; his roommates are out partying or visiting friends and family. Sometimes it does tug at him when he listens to them chirp about their aunts and nephews, going home to roasted turkey and sparkling garlands, presents wrapped with the knowledge of another person’s hopes and dreams. But for the most part he shoves the thoughts away by tucking into bed with a mug of hot chocolate and a retro shooting game. The hallways are eerily silent and this is as close as he'll get to the total isolation that has become his natural habitat.

Then someone knocks on his door. He pauses the game and stands, unsure if he should answer while he's in his pyjamas (though they're really just a pair of jogging pants and a V-neck.) Keith almost drops his mug when the man in the doorway is none other than Captain Shirogane.

"Sir," Keith utters, unable to say anything else. The jogging pants feel entirely inappropriate now.

"You're here alone?"

They were no longer acquaintances since the time Keith was almost expelled. Keith had never explicitly asked for his help but Shiro would drop by once in a while at one of the libraries, carrying with him some incomprehensible engineering books the stack of which often rose above Keith's head. Shiro would notice whenever a mechanics question tied Keith into a simmering knot and the ease with which he solved it would always be equal parts impressive and infuriating.

“Could say the same for you,” Keith replies. Shiro gives him a wry smile that reminds Keith of how different he can be when he gets comfortable with someone. Despite the quip, Keith stands aside to let Shiro in while he scrounges in his wardrobe. Shiro frowns when he pulls out a gin tonic.

“Thought you’d turned a new leaf,” Shiro says, sitting by the edge of Keith’s bed. Keith pulls out a glass and some ice cubes from the mini refrigerator. He pours the gin with the expertise of a seasoned bartender and tops it off with a slice of lime.

Keith chuckles, handing him the drink. “This is from old times. I haven’t had anything but caramel fraps and the occasional cig.”

“The occasional cig,” Shiro mumbles, but he soon relaxes upon the sting of the gin. Keith sits cross-legged on his bed, swirling his mug of chocolate. They’re a quiet pair, but Keith has noticed that silence is different when he shares it with Shiro.

“Well done on your finals,” the captain says, turning to face him. “A toast to your success?”

Keith doesn’t reply for a moment. He just watches Shiro’s stoic expression, the slight upward curve of his lip and his lax shoulders hinting to his lowered guard.

“Hardly,” Keith says, raising his mug. Their glasses clink and the sound rings through the thin air. Shiro tips his drink back but Keith only presses his lip against the rim of the mug.

“I wouldn’t be here without you,” he whispers, almost shyly. “I mean, literally and figuratively. You’ve saved me more than once…and for nothing in return.”

They’d had a similar conversation a couple weeks back, when Shiro had agreed to observe his flight and point out areas of improvement. They were walking back in the rain under Shiro’s umbrella when Keith started going on about how bad he felt for lugging Shiro around like his personal mentor of some sort.

They both know that people have started to look at Shiro differently since he started spending more time training Keith. Keith the charity case, Shiro, trying too hard to be some kind of guiding figure in his life.

It stings Keith more than Shiro would ever realize.

“It’s not like that,” Shiro answers, setting the drink on the bedside desk. “I’m proud of you. For how far you’ve come, how far you’ll go.” Then he adds, uncharacteristically playful, “Your horrible attitude is enough of a reward.”

Keith doesn’t roll his eyes. He places the mug next to Shiro’s glass and takes a deep, winded breath. The chocolate surface spins to a standstill. “Do you get what you mean to me at all?”

Shiro doesn’t reply. Keith exhales through gritted teeth. His annoyance permeates through the air; it’s something they’ve always had, the ability to speak without speaking, to just _know_ what the other feels. In moments, Shiro understands where this is going.

“You don’t…”

Keith glares at him. “I do. You know I do. I always have.”

Keith recalls how he’d walked into the gym one day and seen Shiro in there lifting weights, doing push-ups with one arm across his back, and he’d never gone in there again because it just _clicked._ The thought had popped into his head and it never left again, always rooted in the back of his mind, hoping, each time Shiro broke out in genuine laughter, smirked when he teased Keith, that someday, sometime…

Keith closes his eyes, his knuckles turning ashen white on the sheets. He laughs, a bitter sound. “Forget what I said. I need some fresh air.”

Shiro doesn’t follow Keith as he leaves his own room. Keith goes as far as the Garrison will permit him, at the overhang of a cliff, a cigarette lit in his trembling hand. He’s only had maybe two, three in the last few months. Keith looks at it, winds his arm back and flings it into the horizon. It sparks like a comet in the midnight sky.

 

“You’re leaving?”

“For Kerberos.”

They’re standing at the back door of the perimeter where Shiro had walked with him. Keith feels the air sucked out of his lungs. He’s in his graduation garbs, and it takes all the strength he has to muster out his next words. “Congratulations, captain.”

Incredible pain shoots through his chest when Shiro holds him in an embrace—not strong, like he would with a cadet, but as if he were holding a son, a brother, a lover. Keith presses his cheek against Shiro’s chest and listens to his heart beat, the rapid thudding of a truth Shiro had never let on, the question Keith never thought would be answered. Keith pulls back, cursing under his breath, and is about to start on a litany of rants when Shiro places a kiss on his cheek, and Keith calls him a motherfucker before ramming their mouths together.

 

Several months later, Keith is running through a maintenance check of his plane when his system beeps and a hologram appears before him. The Kerberos mission has been suspended and there is no information on the whereabouts of its passengers.

**Author's Note:**

> SHEITHHH SHEITH FUCKS ME UPPPPPP  
> PLEASE SOMEONE make a sheITH AMV to All Time Low by Jon Bellion,,,,WHERE ARE ALL THE SHEITH FANS??//!! THIS SHIP IS SO UNDERRATED RIP, THEY WERE CANON FROM EP 1 FFSSSS  
> *unintelligible animal noises*


End file.
